Writing the Great War

The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present

Christoph Cornelissen, Arndt Weinrich, Christoph Cornelissen, Arndt Weinrich

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781800737273, 9781789204544
• eBook ISBN: 9781789204575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India's struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.

Chapter 1

(HI)STORIES AND MEMORIES OF THE GREAT WAR IN FRANCE

1914–2018

Nicolas Offenstadt

The historiography of the Great War cannot be fully grasped, as is generally the case, without appraising the place and social function of the war’s memory in society as a whole.¹ In spite of a very strong institutional base, professional historians have always had competition, here, from people who have seen themselves as legitimate narrators of the war. Military people, first and foremost: the generations of those who served in 1914–18 have gradually been replaced by historians with a military background who were not actively engaged in World War I and who still have a considerable foothold in the domain. In the 1960s, the volume about the war (“military operations”) in the series L’Histoire du XXe siècle (The History of the 20th Century), edited by the historian Maurice Baumont for the Sirey publishing house, was put in the hands of General Louis Koeltz, who had served in the 2ème Bureau (France’s external military intelligence agency) in 1914–18. Roughly at the same time, the great publishing house Fayard brought out the Histoire de la Grande Guerre (History of the Great War), written by two officers who had not known that conflict, General Fernand Gambiez and Colonel Maurice Suire. More recently, in the Inventaire de la Grande Guerre (Inventory of the Great War) published by Larousse in 2005 and presented as a form of reference dictionary, out of forty-five authors, eight were officers and seven were researchers in military institutions.² Up until the fiftieth anniversary of the war, war veterans (anciens combattants) also turned themselves into historians of the Great War by distancing themselves a little from their own experiences in order to broaden their outlook—men such as Jacques Meyer, René-Gustave Nobécourt, Victor Bataille, and Pierre Paul produced their version of a historical assessment of the war. The history of 1914–18 is also a history of militants—a militant, politically engaged history. For a long time, the Russian Revolution and the birth of various communist parties and the Third International have informed the work of communist and left-leaning historians. Nowadays, in a new configuration, it is more generally the soldiers’ sufferings and the excesses of military commanders and military justice alike that have been pounced upon by “left-wing” historians, as is made quite explicit by the title of François Roux’s 2006 book, Les Poilus contre l’Armée française (Poilus against the French army). The powerful presence of the Great War in the public sphere, its “public history” dimension (a history written and made for a broad public), also explains the fact that many amateur historians have taken on the subject, thereby making their contribution to its history. In this context, they have capitalized on their knowledge of local terrain, such as the areas of the former front, or emphasized specific war experiences by soldiers from a given region (poilus from Normandy, the Vendée, and so on). Local history, which is traditionally strong in France, finds here a terrain of renewal. These many different historiographical voices, which attest to the scope of the challenges involved, are quite naturally punctuated by time frames that go beyond individual and academic schedules. Commemorations here have a considerable power in terms of impetus, as 1964–68, 1998, or 2014–18 have demonstrated in the most illustrative fashion. So to properly grasp the development of French historiography, it is useful to trace, perforce schematically, the main features of French memories of the conflict and the way they have evolved, with a special emphasis on the former soldiers’ memory that was so pivotal in the definition of the commemorative challenges and stakes.

Remembering, Commemorating 1918–2018

Unlike the stereotypical image of a French nation univocally celebrating its poilus, not to say victory, the memory of 1914–18 has been immediately constructed in rivalries and commemorative tensions with considerable political implications. It is the war veterans who insisted, in 1922, on having 11 November as a “day off,” a national holiday, whereas the government initially wanted to have the commemorative ceremony organized on the Sunday immediately following that date.³ But from then on, that date has been the high point of the memorial calendar. Like-wise, the “making” of the Unknown Soldier, now a consensual symbol, has by no means been uncontroversial: promoted notably by a group of right-leaning war veterans, it has been the subject of numerous debates and disputes concerning the location of the tomb, the burial ceremony, and, more generally, the cult that developed around it.

The war veterans, moreover, did not obtain everything they expected in terms of memorial practices, as is illustrated by the fate of the law of 1919 “relating to the commemoration and glorification of those who died for France during the Great War.” The law included five main provisions: the inscription of the names of those who died for France and of the civilian victims in the registers held in the Pantheon, the establishment for each town and village (commune) of a register with the names of the commune’s combatants who died for France, the erection of a commemorative national monument “of the heroes of the Great War” in Paris or in the surrounding area, the granting of subsidies to communes for the “glorification” of the dead, and the introduction of a ceremony per town and village on 1 or 2 November. This last measure, as has been noted, has been transformed by the war veterans with 11 November as its annual high point. But for the rest . . . no grand national monument (Paul Claudel relaunched the project for the roundabout at La Défense in 1955, just before he died, and a relief “to the glory of France’s armies” by Landowski was inaugurated at the Trocadéro in 1956; however, it was far away from the original design, which was scaled back on several occasions), no register throughout the land, and no register at the Pantheon. In 1951, in the Almanach du Combattant, a somewhat conservative publication launched by 1914–18 veterans, Georges Pineau, a leading light in the movement, rounded on such a forgetful law: “The State has ‘dropped’ the heroes of 1914– 1918.”

The construction of the memory of the Great War is thus less natural than it might seem, for it is also selective. The writing of the national master narrative grabbed the Great War in order to fashion it the way it wanted, in official publications, and in school textbooks too, to a certain extent. The Battle of Verdun, for example, has become emblematic of French “resistance” to the Germans, to the point of appearing to be the Great War’s battle of all battles. On the other hand, the Battle of the Chemin des Dames (1917), which was just as important, has been subject to a shortfall in memory, which war veterans were still grumbling about in the 1960s because it was a slaughter caused by the strategic choices of the General Staff. The different memorial cultures of the conflict (literature of combatants about the war and of war veterans about what became of them afterward, films, plays, songs, and the like) are interwoven with political, social and historiographical issues, but we cannot go into detail about all that at this juncture. In a nutshell, retracing the developments of the memories and history of 1914–18 since the end of the conflict calls for reminding us about both the competition of memory, the tensions of remembrance, and the strength of the frameworks within which history is written.

1919–1939: The Burden of Mourning

Memorial Centers

For public institutions, during the postwar years, remembering meant coming to terms with the massive bereavement and mourning that weighed on French society as a whole. This included finding a way to express and acknowledge the particular mourning of those thousands of crushed bodies that had not been found. It was in 1916 that the idea seemed to emerge of honoring one soldier as a symbol for all those poilus. The sense of loss was so massive that new kinds of commemorations seemed called for, in France and elsewhere.⁴ The project assumed a parliamentary dimension in 1918. Several members of parliament agreed to propose the burial of one soldier in the Pantheon, a place of republican memory since the 1880s. Journalists and right-wing and far-right militants refused the site as the last resting place of the Unknown Soldier, too republican in their eyes, just as they rejected the merger between the inhumation of the Unknown Soldier and the fiftieth anniversary of the Republic (1920). Press campaigns were undertaken in favor of the Unknown Soldier’s burial beneath the Arc de Triomphe. In 1919, this latter site received a large wood-and-plaster cenotaph that was used for the funereal evening gathering preceding the Victory Festival and the huge procession of 14 July. The final choice of the Arc de Triomphe for the burial of the Unknown Soldier ushered in the patriotic dimension of mourning and sacrifice. It also showed the central place held by the Battle of Verdun in the political commemoration of the Great War. It was in the city’s citadel that the eight coffins were put together, brought from different battlefields, in order to designate the one unknown to be transferred to Paris. Different rituals surrounded the selection ceremony and added to its solemn character. The seven others are still at Verdun,⁵ buried in the Faubourg-Pavé cemetery, thus constituting an additional place of memory for the city, and one that is still very carefully maintained today. If the Unknown Soldier symbolizes all those who died during the war, “the child of a whole people in mourning,”⁶ and those missing in action in particular, he is also a specific icon of the combatant memory, like a guardian genie in the postwar period and beyond. “The Unknown Soldier is ours, comrades,” proclaimed the Almanach du Combattant in 1922. So from 1921 onward,⁷ the Unknown Soldier became a central and essential place symbolizing the memory of the war. But as Antoine Prost underscores, that soldier is just one “among others, probably the most prestigious, but not the only one.”⁸

Public Places of Remembrance

The war altogether reshaped the public space of remembrance. It is possible to single out three main forms in this respect. The first, from the time of the war itself, was linked to the erection of plaques, monuments, and places of memory along the front lines of 1914–18, in the northeastern part of the country. In a second phase, there was the movement to erect monuments to the dead—war memorials—throughout the land, colonies included. Lastly, the national territory was filled with memorial inscriptions referring to the Great War. They are everywhere: on buildings, in streets, in railway stations, in cemeteries, and on war memorials. Rather than recalling well-known data, let us here take a somewhat detailed example. Nowadays, the small village of Sainte-Paule, perched amid vineyards in the Beaujolais region, with its golden stones and such distinctive hues and topography, has some 250 inhabitants, down from 372 in 1914, many of them winegrowers. The village seems to have hardly changed since the Great War, but the war’s traces are conspicuous for such a little place. As everywhere, there is a war memorial, here located in front of the communal cemetery. On one of the column’s sides are listed the places where the village’s children fell (Alsace, the Marne, etc.), while on another side there is an inscription saying that the memorial was erected in 1921 “with the generous help of all the inhabitants,” as was often the case. The communal archives confirm as much, because they hold the subscription accounts book: some people subscribed individually, in their own name, others as “households” (maisons). The monument here was undoubtedly a matter involving all and sundry. In other places, however, there may have been general, religious, and political disputes about the sense and form of the monument.⁹ At Sainte-Paule, communal and departmental grants complemented the subscription. It was in 1919 that the process was launched with the appointment of a mixed committee made up of village councilors and war veterans. The side of the memorial facing the village bears the names of the dead and the place where they died. There are twenty-one of them. All...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Understanding World War I: One Hundred Years of Historiographical Debate and Worldwide Commemoration
• Chapter 1. (Hi)stories and Memories of the Great War in France: 1914–2018
• Chapter 2. Histories and Memories: Recounting the Great War in Belgium, 1914–2018
• Chapter 3. British and Commonwealth Historiography of World War I: 1914–2018
• Chapter 4. Of Expectations and Aspirations: South Asian Perspectives on World War I, the World, and the Subcontinent, 1918–2018
• Chapter 5. German Historiography on World War I, 1914–2019
• Chapter 6. Austrian Historiography and Perspectives on World War I: The Long Shadow of the “Just War,” 1914–2018
• Chapter 7. Russia and World War I: The Politics of Memory and Historiography, 1914–2018
• Chapter 8. The Invention of Yugoslav Identity: Serbian and South Slav Historiographies on World War I, 1918–2018
• Chapter 9. A Seminal “Anti-Catastrophe”? Historiography on World War I in Poland, 1914–2019
• Chapter 10. A Historiographical Turn: Evolving Interpretations of Japan during World War I, 1914–2019
• Chapter 11. Coming to Terms with the Imperial Legacy and the Violence of War: Turkish Historiography of World War I between Autarchy and a Plurality of Voices, 1914–2018
• Chapter 12. Italian Memory, Historiography, and World War I: 1914–2019
• Chapter 13. Finding a Place for World War I in American History: 1914–2018
• Index